Educating Technical Communication Teachers: The Origins, Development, and Present Status of the Course, “Teaching Technical Writing” at Illinois State University (original) (raw)

2013, Communication & Language at Work

Revising the technical communication curriculum

Programmatic Perspectives, 2012

This article describes our process for revising the technical communication service course at UMass Dartmouth, using Robert Reich’s (1991) description of the symbolic analyst. Reich’s framework helped us identify our curricular needs, providing a rhetorical ground for defining our course and its objectives. This framework also worked to place rhetorical principles at the center of our curriculum and helped create a space for active student learning.

Teaching Technical Communication - Unexpected Experience

2001

In 1998, a course on technical communication was introduced at the Faculty of Electronics and Information Technology, Warsaw University of Technology. Some of its characteristic features are: (a) the course has been developed and taught by a team of a university professor and a senior engineer from a marketing division of a large industrial company; (b) the lectures cover several non-traditional topics, such as "Int ernet as a source of information" and "legal and ethical aspects of technical writing"; (c) self- and peer-reviewing of student assignments is employed. Our observations indicate that some assumptions underlying the development of the course were incorrect. In particular, contrary to our expectations, the students have been much better technical speakers than technical writers. Based on such observations, several changes in the contents and organization of the course have been made.

Wicked Problems in Technical Communication

Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 2014

This article develops a framework for rhetorical inquiry that builds on the concept of wicked problems as conceptualized through social policy and design studies research. Responding to technical communication scholarship that calls for increased engagement with public issues and controversies, the author specifically discusses a writing course that used the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a basis for teaching problem-based rhetorical invention, document production, interdisciplinary collaboration, and professional development. The framework described in this article ultimately offers a heuristic for students to research and write about ill-defined problems that must be addressed in time but that demand sustained engagement over time—activities that begin in the classroom but ideally continue to develop throughout their personal and professional lives.

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